Professor Amélie Quesnel-Vallée, from McGill University will be presenting a seminar entitled: Inequalities in Aging in Canada: Adventures in Administrative Data Wonderland.
Background: The interplay between different income insurance programs (e.g. unemployment, disability and social welfare), and particularly benefit substitution between these programs, remains understudied in health research in North America. In this paper, we examine how trajectories of income insurance benefits relate to health and disability in older adulthood in Canada.
Data and methods: Data come from the Longitudinal and International Survey of Adults (LISA), a biennial panel survey began in 2012 by Statistics Canada. The LISA surveys 32,133 respondents about employment, income and well-being, notably using a retrospective administrative data tax records linkage going as far back as 1982. We first constructed detailed government program transfer histories spanning twenty years of the respondents’ life course. Next, we used MPlus to estimate household income trajectories, finding a four-category model (low income, middle-low, middle-high, high) fit the data best. Finally, we estimated binomial logistic models relating these trajectories and income insurance benefit histories to poor self-rated health and disability status among respondents 45 to 64 years old in 2014. All analyses were stratified by sex, but there were no substantive differences in the analytic findings.